“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
-– B. Lester

A student of the academic school in the city of Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Maruf Karimov, invented a “perpetual” car engine power by a very unusual kind of fuel. The student managed to start a conventional internal combustion engine with the help of air pressure.

The fuel – air that is – flows into the engine from a special tank filled with air under high pressure. It is worthy of note that the tank refills itself automatically non-stop. The engine designed by 15-year-old boy can thus be described as perpetual.

Karimov installed his invention on his friends’ old car and drove several hundreds of meters. The speed was very low, but the young engineer is certain that the output of the engine is only a matter of time and effort.

The drawings and calculations of the Uzbek student have already been sent to specialists from Germany. It is not ruled out that Maruf Karimov will continue his research work in Germany, Fergana.ru reports. ...

Scientists and engineers accept the possibility that the current understanding of the laws of physics may be incomplete or incorrect; a perpetual motion device may not be impossible, but overwhelming evidence would be required to justify rewriting the laws of physics.

The recorded history of perpetual motion machines date back to the 12th century. Proponents of perpetual motion machines use a number of other terms to describe their inventions, including "free energy" and "over unity" machines. The earliest references to perpetual motion machines date back to 1150, by an Indian mathematician-astronomer, Bhaskara II. He described a wheel that he claimed would run forever. Villard de Honnecourt in 1235 described, in a thirty-three page manuscript, a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Robert Boyle's self-flowing flask appears to fill itself through siphon action. This is not possible in reality; a siphon requires its "output" to be lower than the "input".

In 1775 Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris issued the statement that Academy "will no longer accept or deal with proposals concerning perpetual motion". Johann Bessler (also known as Orffyreus) created a series of claimed perpetual motion machines in the 18th Century. In the 19th century, the invention of perpetual motion machines became an obsession for many scientists. Many machines were designed based on electricity, but none of them lived up to their promises. Another early prospector in this field was John Gamgee. Gamgee developed the Zeromotor, a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.

Devising these machines is a favourite pastime of many eccentrics, who often come up with elaborate machines in the style of Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson. These designs may appear to work on paper at first glance. Usually, though, various flaws or obfuscated external power sources have been incorporated into the machine. Such activity has made them useless in the practice of "invention".